It'll Forever Be Funny How When You Rescue Mikau From The Great Bay Waters That He Goes From "help Me

Come here, baby gays, and let me tell you the story about how James Somerton made me so fucking angry with a single line that I had to make this post.

As I now know, most of his audience is young queers and there are things we NEED you to know.

The fight for marriage equality was a massive fucking deal and I will tell you why with a very personal story.

My mom was a nurse during the AIDS crisis. And I mean she started working as a nurse out of school in 85. My mom was on the front lines. She worked with so many AIDS patients that it genuinely altered her brain chemistry. My mother was a homophobe before her nursing career. She was a massive supporter of gay rights until she died in July because of what she saw during her career.

And what did she see?

She saw people who had been abandoned by their families dying with their partners at their side.

And then suddenly…the family would materialize, ban the partner from the room, kick them out of their homes they had lived in with their dying partners for decades, and then watched them ban their partners from even attending the funerals or visiting the graves. Imagine being denied your right to grieve.

And why was this possible? Oh simple. They weren’t married. They weren’t legally bound, the partners weren’t considered next of kin because they weren’t fucking married.

I watched my mom pass. It was horrible and painful and traumatic and terrifying. But it was closure. And I wouldn’t have it any other way because I know…that who my mom wanted by her when she passed was my dad. Because she was scared, she wanted her partner by her side and she was terrified she was going to die. My dad couldn’t be there. He had to work, which sounds cold but understand he had been off work for a month by that point and he was the only one who had health insurance. He wanted to be there, we had made plans to take her off the life support when he came back (we were 4 hours from him) but there was a freak accident and she passed the night after he left to return to work.

Why am I telling you this? Because I need you to understand how important this is to some people. So you can understand how big a slap to the face it is to have people say “marriage equality isn’t that important”. You can understand why someone like James Somerton rolling his eyes at marriage equality and implying we weren’t focused on job equality and discrimination (information that is WHOLEY untrue) would make me see red.

It’s not trivial. It’s not meaningless. It wasn’t about “assimilating” or “appearing normal” (we’re already normal).

It’s about people who had their children taken from them because they weren’t the biological parent. It’s about people who never got to comfort their loved ones in their final days. It’s about people who weren’t able to comforted by their partners in their final days.

So the next time you think “why waste your time on something as trivial as marriage?” Remember my mother. Look up testimony from victims of the AIDS crisis. Remember the people who advocated for marriage equality were the survivors who were torn from the love of their life.

Remember that we advocated so damn hard to give you the right to grieve.

just remembered a fic on AO3 (or more likely LJ because it had that distinct 00's experimental vibe) that appeared double-spaced oddly, in that some paragraphs would be spaced normally and others would have double or even triple spaces in between. it was about one half of the otp getting over the other's death (or coma, can't remember which), so all the comments were about how poignant the use of visual spacing was as a means to convey all the emotional holes in the character's life.

and then the author replied like... *giggle* guys it's NOT double spaced. try selecting the whole text

and we were all like "no WAY"

but we selected the text, and yes!!!

the "holes" in the story? they were actually lines and actions from the dead/coma character's ghost, rendered invisible to the eye by the simple trick of coloring the text the exact same as the background, revealed by nothing more than a click and a drag of the mouse

a story about the profound loneliness of losing your the partner of your life and having to make do without them, without anything to fill the holes they'd left behind, suddenly became a story about the profound helplessness of seeing someone you love suffer from your absence while you are right there, unable to do anything about it, unable to communicate that you love them enough to suffer unseen and unheard with them, just to keep them company they'll never know about

it was then that I truly realized how *superior* the digital medium is to plain printed paper, how the medium and the format can add to a story.

I think about that fic about once a year. I wish I could find it again

Reblog to give the person you reblogged from the ability to finish their WIPs

What with bucket hats, bare midriffs, and flared jeans having been resurrected by some irresponsible necromancer with frosted tips, I figure there’s no better time to resurrect some of my favorite Y2K fonts. I typically only see the same three or four pop up in discussions on the subject, so maybe this will be helpful to nostalgic designers. Click though for links.

Keep reading

Extremely good youtube thumbnail in my subscriptions today courtesy of Gem SquidSchool.

I hate that I’m always trying to find cool biology themed stuff to wear but all the “nature inspired” clothing companies just have like two crossed arrows or a minimalistic mountain on a sweatshirt. Fucking lame, that’s barely even nature-adjacent. Put the life cycle of a salamander on a jacket, put hyena skeleton patterns on leggings, put a damn field guide of birds of prey on a peacoat and THEN you can have my money. Do NOT give me a shirt with a leaf on it that says “stay wild” or some bullshit I would much prefer clothing that broadcasts to everyone around me how many teeth an adult Jaguar has or how some pitcher plants can catch and digest rats.

Happy anniversary to the rumor coming out about does Bruno Mars is gay

A humble request from Bowser

(Based on the Bowser Revolution graphic from Mario Party DS)